A significant change in commerce arose in the form of e-commerce, which is the use of personal devices such as personal computers or smartphones to access a web site or app (application software) for the purpose of buying goods and/or services and remotely executing a payment via the web site's or app's payment service. E-commerce is constantly growing in popularity as laptops, smartphones, and tablets become more prevalent. Since e-commerce transactions are remote transactions with respect to the vendor, the purchaser is required to manually enter credit card or payment information either directly into the web site of the vendor, a web site portal of a payment service provider, or into a digital wallet service such as PayPal or MasterPass™. Manually entering credit card information can place the credit card information at different levels of risk depending upon the location of the user and the device utilized to conduct the transaction.
Currently, transactions involving manual entry of credit card information also incur higher processing fees because these transactions are considered card not present (CNP) transactions. The higher processing fees are assessed in the CNP transactions because the cardholder and the payment instrument are not physically present at a certified POS device at the time the payment is made. E-commerce transactions are also riskier transactions since it is easier to commit fraud by stealing account information and using it to make remote payments where the actual card is not needed to complete a CNP transaction.